


Goin' Home

by Glinda



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Community: fandom_stocking, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-09
Updated: 2011-11-09
Packaged: 2017-10-27 04:09:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/291473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Gaila sets foot on a Starfleet vessel it feels like home, it takes her another twenty years before she's allowed to call it that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Goin' Home

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this for someone's fandom stocking, not last year but the year before. I can't remember whose. :S I ran out of time and never finished it but I was re-reading it this evening and felt inspired to finish it. 600 words later...

The first time Gaila sets foot on a Starfleet vessel, she is eight years old and the ship she had originally been travelling to her new home on is in pieces behind them. The Orion Confederation has an uneasy relationship with the Federation, but whatever their moral objections to Orion society, Federation ships don’t turn a blind eye to damaged civilian ships and rarely demand payment in kind from the passengers. There are far worse ships that could have rescued them.

Gaila reminds the Chief of Engineering of his own little girl, so she spends most of the journey in Engineering being fussed over, fed strange sweet foods and learning about warp drives. The way the words seem to make an instinctive sense to her, the way the smiles of her temporary mentors became warm and fond when she points out patterns and errors in the formula or programmes, stays with her long after her short sojourn. Gaila’s always been under the impression that Earthers family units are very small things, but the ease, trust and familiarity amid the Engineering staff reminds her of clan at home more than anything else. When she arrives on the dusty new colony world that will be her home for the next ten years, it will be this that she misses as much as the lush foliage of her home world. It will be years before she understands that there is more standing between her and being a Starfleet engineer than Orion not being in the Federation.

It takes blood, sweat, tears and a lot of engine oil to get her to the academy. She stows herself away of trading ship bound for the nearest Starbase and from there stows away on the next Starfleet vessel bound for Earth. It’s not until two days out from Earth that she’s found and they only catch her because she’s head and shoulders inside a wall panel fixing some dodgy wiring. The Chief of Engineering, a tall woman with antennae called Johnson, speaks up for Gaila; turns out she was one of the junior engineers on Gaila’s first voyage and remembers her well. The Captain of the ship is a man by the name of Pike, and given the reputation that proceeds him, Gaila’s a bit star struck and tells him so. He must hear something in her explanation that no one else does, because instead of locking her in the Brig he offers to help her make her case to Starfleet for admission to the academy. So she spends the last two days of the journey to Earth sitting in Engineering being given a crash-course in the latest developments in warp engine technology and eating the strange sweet foods the engineers seem to consume in great quantities. Though the rest of the staff are a bit more wary of her, Gaila can feel that same sense of clan she got before and she wants that more than almost anything else.

Captain Pike keeps his word and spends a lot of time arguing her case in endless meetings while she fills in dozens of forms and studies hard for the exams she needs to take in lieu of Starfleet’s normal entry requirements.

Some days it feels like getting into Starfleet academy was the easiest part. The engineering classes are easy, the science makes perfect sense and she comes top in the class without even trying. She finds herself bumped up to the advanced courses in short order and there are plenty of her classmates who are more interested in her theories than her planet of origin. It’s just that she’s always loved to dance, the press of bodies on the dance-floor, the anonymity of the crowd. She’s been looking forward to that here, to persuade some beautiful person to come off the dance-floor and home with her for a different kind of dancing, here where her body doesn’t come with a price tag. Her engineering classmates are all in their final year, too much work for the kind of serious dancing and drinking she has in mind. Mostly, her classmates from her other classes ignore her. She knows that they were all given the ‘don’t hassle the green girl about being from Orion, she had to work damn hard to get here’ speech at the start of term and apparently a lot of them can’t think of a way to start a conversation other than ‘so, you’re green’ so don’t say anything at all. She doesn’t mind, internally she’s fascinated by the way that humans come in some many varieties, shapes and shades.

She doesn’t have much to do with communications track cadets until the beautiful, serious and studious girl next door knocks on her door out of the blue one day. Her name is Uhura and she’s doing a project on Orion languages for Xenolinguistics and is frankly appalled at the lack of literature in the Starfleet library. Uhura is polite but insistent and both pleased and surprised when the price Gaila demands for her assistance is an evening of dancing. Uhura moves every bit as well on the dance floor as Gaila suspected and her rare laughter is so joyful that Gaila vows there and then to be the cause of it as often as possible. The feedback loop of each other’s enthusiasm and laughter carries them through the hard parts and into the uncharted territory of friendship. Over time the project becomes as much Gaila’s project as Uhura’s and she ends up with unexpected credits in linguistics while they co-author an article on neglected languages for the Academy’s own journal.

The article ends up being published in a major Xenolinguistics journal and Uhura is torn between delight and despair that she has become the major expert in the field outside of Orion pretty much by default. It will not be until their final year, long after Gaila has become one of the very few allowed to called her Nyota, that she will confess that she invented the project entirely as a conversation starter. Confiding that she’d gone to the library to find out more about the languages of Orion to give herself a cover story only to discover that there was practically nothing in the library. What had started as a desire for some non-communications track friends had ended up with her gaining a whole new language, a room-mate and an awful lot of hangovers. Gaila still finds Nyota too be overly serious and to have some weird hang ups about sex during exam season, but Gaila still loves that full-bodied laugh of hers. Also there’s something about greeting and being greeted by your best-friend in very relieved Orion - and a really tight hug - when you’ve nearly died that makes her whole disastrous first mission on the Enterprise worthwhile.

The Enterprise’s Engineering department is, if anything, even more eccentric than her two previous experiences of Starfleet ships had led her to believe. They lost a lot of good people thanks to Nero’s vengeance trip and those who have survived are bound all the more tightly because most of the survivors learned how to run Engineering under fire, often badly injured and sometimes because they were the only one willing to move their former superior’s corpse out the way. Scotty stepped into the void none of them wanted to fill and stayed there because his brilliant, ridiculous ideas worked. His Standard is occasionally incomprehensible, he eats sandwiches in truly inappropriate places and when Command finds out about the Still that he and Kenseer are running there will be trouble. But he fights to keep them all together and alive, gives them space to experiment and make mistakes and can verbalise the importance of clan like no other Terran Gaila has ever met. Its dangerous and terrifying and brilliant and nothing like she ever expected but out among the stars Gaila has engines and strange new civilizations to explore. And for the first time in a long time she has a clan to call her own once more.  



End file.
